Friday, November 20, 2009

Mountain bike commute: Alpine Rd and Montebello+Fremont Older OSPs

Oct 21st & November 17th & 19th, AM. On the Spot belt-drive 29er SingleSpeed. First two scouting trips were solo, last one with Isaias. The objective is to hit as much interesting dirt as possible while generally heading towards work.

- caltrain to Menlo Park

- dirt trail along Alma

- head to Alpine road, and ride the dirt between Westridge and Arastradero

- takes an hour to get to the point where Alpine turns into fireroad. The rest of the trip to Apple is mostly dirt.

- the initial scouting trip last month was complicated by multiple trees down on Alpine after a big storm. These have all been cleared since:

- highlight of yesterday's trip was being able to clear all Alpine road's washed out bypass for the 1st time:

- the best part of the ride is next with the mostly all downhill dirt through the Montebello Open Space Preserve. Last month Canyon Trail was the only option because White Oak was closed due to wet conditions. It has since reopened so White Oak was taken to the lower portion of Canyon Trail, which eventually dumps out onto Stevens Canyon Rd. Future hilly diversions could include Bella Vista to Old Ranch trail to near the top of black mountain to Indian Creek.

- hike 1 mile through Stevens Creek County Park on Lookout Trail since biking is not allowed (a lot of it is too steep for my singlespeed monster bike anyway). This is the only south-westernly entrance to Fremont Older Open Space Preserve, and might even be the only southern entrance unless there's some way off Mt Eden.

- ride through Fremont Older along Vista Loop, Fern, Hayfield, and Regnart trails. Still have more to explore there:

5 comments:

Yep. Ordered it last year, also after demoing at Sea Otter. After a long shipping delay, the belt drive initially had slipping trouble so the bike wasn't used at all last year and was converted to a chain setup earlier this year. After talking with Spot at Interbike, they provided parts from their 2009 belt drivetrain that appears to have fixed the issues. At long last the Spot is back to sporting the belt drive. So far it's working out great. Nice not to have to clean/grease a chain!

Aero bars are great encouragement to those in front to move faster! Sometime this year I'll be installing drop bars on this bike so I'll have less need for the aero bars since it's mainly about having a variety of hand positions on long rides than actually being in an aero tuck.